Who picked the Pikmin before Olimar showed up? http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/reviewArt.cfm?artid=17993 I never played the original Pikmin for the GameCube, but my friends told me that, generally, it was a very good game. My own hesitation sprang from the fact that I may be the worst real-time strategy player on the planet. My experiences in the genre began and ended with the first two Warcraft games; Starcraft was too much of a challenge for me. Of course, I was quite young, and with age and experience comes patience, so maybe IÂ’d like the genre more now. Even so, those early failures have prevented me from even touching the genre for years afterwards. A foolish mistake, perhaps, and one that has (until now) stopped me from experiencing the joy that is Pikmin.
Pikmin is the story of a miniature space delivery man, Olimar, and his quest to recover the scattered parts of his ruined ship after an unfortunate encounter with a meteor fragment. Olimar crash-lands on a planet not entirely unlike our own, populated by a wealth of arthropods and familiar vegetation. The problem is that Olimar is about two inches tall. Flowers tower overhead, beetles stomp around like dinosaurs, and the smallest puddles become hazardous lakes! However will our hero repair his ship? With the help of Pikmin, of course! These tiny plant-like critters eagerly follow Olimar around and are perfectly willing to do his bidding. He can command up to 100 of the little fellows at a time and dole out orders accordingly. Have your yellow Pikmin bomb a roadblock while the reds take out a giant beetle and the blues build a bridge! Each Pikmin color has its own strength: reds are fire-resistant and deal more damage than the other colors, so they are good fighters. Blues can wade through water unharmed and build bridges. Yellows can carry and use bomb rocks for blowing up roadblocks.
You recruit Pikmin by finding power pellets (they’re everywhere) and having your Pikmin drag them back their homes (Onions). The pellet is sucked up and more Pikmin pop out and await Olimar to pluck them from the ground. They key here is that the color of the power pellet doesn’t matter very much—more important is the predominant color amongst the Pikmin who are carrying it. If you want to recruit more reds, have reds drag the power pellets! If you give a red pellet to a blue Pikmin, he will turn the pellet into more blues. However, matching pellet and Pikmin colors will yield additional troops. Pellets come in all sizes, each helpfully displaying the number of Pikmin required to move it. Some require many Pikmin to drag it back to the Onion—up to twenty! Defeated enemies can also be carried back to the Onions, and the more Pikmin than required that are carrying an object, the faster it will go!
Pikmin have three power levels: leaf, bud, and flower. The longer you leave a Pikmin seed in the ground, the more powerful it will become. Additionally, Pikmin will drink nectar they find on the ground, which powers them up. The power level determines their running speed, carrying speed, and damage potential: an army of flower Pikmin will never stray behind Olimar and haul swag fervently!
Olimar has thirty days to collect all thirty pieces of his ship, and each day lasts roughly fifteen minutes. Since each landscape you visit is so different, you can spend entire days just exploring and getting the lay of the land, and, indeed, this may be good planning on your part. Most structures and enemies donÂ’t reset overnight, so itÂ’s good to spend a day blowing up roadblocks, building bridges, and taking out the most headache-inducing enemies so that youÂ’re free to roam around looking for spaceship parts in subsequent days. And if you feel like youÂ’re lagging, you can restart your game from any previous day, although that will overwrite any progress youÂ’ve made since then.
The game utilizes the Wii Remote wonderfully, and you really only need to worry about four commands. You move Olimar with the control stick, dismiss your Pikmin into groups (for easy sorting) with C, throw an individual Pikmin with A, tell the entire group to do something with down on the D-pad, and call your Pikmin with B. Calling Pikmin re-activates dismissed Pikmin and stops active Pikmin from whatever it is theyÂ’re doing to come back to you. The rest of the D-pad controls the camera. The Wii RemoteÂ’s pointer functionality works great for aiming your tosses and recalling distant groups of Pikmin, and really streamlines what I imagine was a more complicated process of estimation on the GameCube.
Of course, leading a group of one-hundred Pikmin has its downsides, too. With a group that large, accidentally running into sleeping enemies becomes a liability. Also, Pikmin have a bad habit of getting caught up on the environment’s geometry and automatically dismissing themselves because they aren’t brainy enough to go around a tree root instead of through it. Yellows could be a whole lot more accurate with their bomb-rock placement. If you don’t act quickly, your entire squad could get blown to smithereens because the idiot yellow placed the bomb way too close to the group. It quickly becomes apparent that the best way to do things is to take your Pikmin through levels color-by-color rather than in a mixed group, giving each color group a certain task and letting everyone work separately, but simultaneously, to accomplish a goal. There will definitely be times where you will need to oversee a group’s success—almost every enemy encounter requires your presence (which can slow things down, honestly)—but on the whole, the Pikmin are good about completing tasks given to them.
Pikmin's daily time limit is concerning, though. Rather than feeling a sense of freedom and wonder, daily searches feel more like frenzied rushes filled with worry as the sun moves across the sky (helpfully displayed on a meter at the top of the screen). If you ignore the ticking clock and donÂ’t get your Pikmin safely to their Onions at sunset, the planetÂ’s nocturnal horrors will run around and gobble up the stragglers. I actually restarted my game after 12 in-game days because IÂ’d only found 10 parts, and it took me about that long to really get comfortable with a routine.
Fortunately, the game bombards you with helpful tips and tutorials, so itÂ’s a pretty easy game to get the gist of. And once it clicks for you, Pikmin is a very fun, rewarding game. ThereÂ’s just something about watching your army haul back a bounty from a hard dayÂ’s work thatÂ’s very satisfying.
Pros:
A simple RTS that anyone can get into The elegant control scheme makes commanding your army a snap Beautiful levels and enmies that are both comical and fearsome Cons: Pikmin often get stuck or goof off The time limit feels artificial and is frustrating Graphics: 8.0 The graphics are barely changed from the GC version, with the only addition being true widescreen support (no sidebars here) and tutorial schematics showing the Wii Remote instead of the GC controller. Even so, the organic worlds are beautiful. The creatures you encounter look a little blocky at times, especially the red beetle things.
Sound: 8.0 The music isn’t exactly catchy, but it’s pleasant and fits the game well. Your Pikmin make cute little sounds—it’s almost tragic when reds and yellows drown, or any of your troops are eaten by an enemy!
Control: 9.0 The controls couldnÂ’t be simpler, although you may have to move the camera around to get the best view of where the pointer is in relation to an enemy. Using the on-screen cursor to toss Pikmin onto larger enemies takes some getting used to because you have to estimate how high a Pikmin will go, not how far.
Gameplay: 7.0 I canÂ’t stand the time limit! Luckily, achieving your goals is always fun and satisfying, which motivates you continue playing. But really, just five or ten more days would have given Pikmin a much more relaxed pace.
Lastability: 9.0
It will take you a pretty long time to learn the layout of the levels with enough detail that you can successfully acquire all 30 parts of your ship without a hitch. And after playing the main game for awhile, Challenge mode gives you a whopper of a variation on the main game. I wonÂ’t ruin that surprise.
Final: 8.0
Pikmin is a great game that’s weighed down by the frustrating time limit and hiccups in Pikmin behavior. It's hard to imagine how people played the original game with a GC controller, because the Wii setup is just so elegant. It can take a while to get into the flow of the game, but once you do, you're hooked. If you already have Pikmin for the ‘Cube you probably don’t need this version, but if you’ve never played it before, now’s your chance!
Topic: REVIEWS: New Play Control! Pikmin (Read 23857 times)
